Reunion
by CompanionWanderer
Summary: A Little Princess, filmbased. A novelization of the reunion scene between Sara and her father, with alternating points of view. Really just my excuse to play with words.
1. Chapter 1

_A Little Princess_ and all its characters were created by Frances Hodgeson Burnett, who accomplished possibly the most miraculous feat in the history of literature: she created, in her Sara Crewe and Ceddie Errol, the respective poster children for Mary-Sue and Gary-Stu, and still managed to make them engaging to the reader.

I am passionately fond of Burnett's works, and have never seen a film version of any that does it justice. However, the 1995 production of _A Little Princess_ remains a guilty favorite. It stretches the limits of suspension-of-disbelief, alters Sara beyond recognition, and completely misses the point of the original story with its silly modern self-esteem-stroking "all-girls-are-princesses" interpretation. It is contrived, saccharine, and banks too much on the cuteness of its young stars.

But it's just so darn aesthetic. I forgive much for the sake of an artistically beautiful film, and besides Liesel Matthews herself was such a gorgeous kid. Even though I know I'm being manipulated, I still get emotional at the reunion scene.

So here's my little internal interpretation of that. It's less a true fic than a novelized form of this scene of the film, I guess. I wrote it not to add anything to the story but just to have fun playing with language. Hope you enjoy.

* * *

"_Strange to have your heart remember something your mind cannot."_

He is tired, tired of convalescence, his soldier's mind chafing under the weight of inactivity. His body is weak yet, but his senses are sharp – or perhaps it is only that four of them seem heightened for the loss of one. Beneath linen bandages his eyes ache wearily.

They tell him his vision will return to normal in time. _Time_. The concept rankles at him these days…he can measure each motion of the second hand, crawling by in endless monotony as he wracks his brain for some small distraction that does not come. The clock, he has learned by asking, stands in the corner of his room. He has never before been aware of how loudly a clock ticks. If Sahib wishes, it shall be removed, if it disturbs him. No. Somehow he prefers it, an anchoring rhythm, to the still void of silence.

Sahib. That word. It rolls through the mouth like a sip of spiced wine, strangely familiar. It intrigues him; it frustrates him; it is a key with no lock, always spoken by a voice rich and dark, and accompanied by a musky aura of incense. It attends him tirelessly, with a quiet patience that somehow he recognized as foreign, even before it spoke the two exotic syllables of its name. _I am called Ram Dass_. The velvet baritone of the voice soothes him often, speaking to him of things that are small and familiar, smoothing out the ragged minutes into satin hours.

But he thinks not in terms of passing minutes but of passing questions, each of which is so heavy that he cannot hold it long. They drop through his mind like stones into the ocean, ringing the surface briefly before drifting into vast and fathomless depths. Questions without answers, or none that he can remember. No faces, no names swim to the surface. Not even his own.

He knows he is in America; New York, to be exact. He is sure he has never been here before, yet somehow the name holds a heavy significance, one that slips away, like a shining fish, just when he seems about to pin it down.

He knows he was found half-dead on a battlefield in France, without identification. Some cruel joke of the gods had brought a hopeful old gentleman to his bedside, and now he convalesces in the old man's home, though he is not the son that Randolph had hoped to find. So much he has been told, and guilt and pride gnaw at him like a canker. To be both the dashing of a father's hopes and the object of his charity is a burden at war with his gratitude.

He sleeps fitfully, wrestling with dreams in which he seems always to be searching for something. Through war-torn trenches thick with noxious fumes and dying men; through sun-dappled stone corridors with trellised walls hung with jasmine, through dusty streets where dark-faced men shout in a strange language, he stumbles, half-blinded, always sure that the thing he seeks is just before him, ever just beyond his sight. Once, he hears an echo of childish laughter, glimpses a white-lace flash at the hem of a girl's frock, and cries out in his sleep. But when he wakes, he remembers only the same frustrated emptiness that characterizes every waking moment.

Enough. It has been three days, and his fretful nerves will let him rest no longer. His window has been left open and the room is cold; the air heavy and pregnant with impending rain. Thunder growls, menacing, in the distance; closer, a child wails, a shrill, despairing sound. He must have light. He suddenly craves it desperately.

Alone in the room, he sits up in bed, plucking nervously at the sheets before flinging them away. Cold air pricks at his legs, and he swings them over the edge of the bed, quickly, before he can lose his nerve. His head spins; he sits for a moment, waiting for the dizziness to clear; he is soldier enough to recognize it as the result of being too long supine, rather than a symptom of continuing illness.

The bed has posts; he grasps one, pulls himself unsteadily to his feet and sways a little, breathing hard. The child's voice has not ceased to shriek; the sound fills him with such distress that he interrupts his intent toward his bandages and instead gropes his way across the room, where the sound emanates from his open window. His hands find the wide casements, swing in an arc against the pressure of the cool outside air, and the child's anxious cries cease with the click of a window latch. Feeling vaguely guilty, he turns his back on it, and reaches for the bandages.


	2. Chapter 2

_She has known despair and terror before this. That first black, endless night in the attic, when she lay curled in a circle on the wet floor, the anguished longing in her mind numbing her to its discomfort as she waited…waited…waited for a voice, a sense, a comforting presence that never came. Instead came emptiness, and an agony of grief as grim reality crept over her consciousness as surely as the numbing cold crept over her shivering little form. In her anguish she had cried out a name, many times, without knowing she did so, for she heard not the call of her own voice over the shrieking of her inner torment. _

_She does not know how she lived through that night. She only knows that she did. And tonight she will also live; tonight, her fear and despair are countered by one more emotion – anger. Fury at the injustice done her, wrath at her own powerlessness. It is anger that compels her to beat uselessly against the door of the attic, anger that prods her to continually protest her innocence, anger that finally turns her, seething, from the unmoved finality of a locked door. It is her anger that keeps her strong, and her fear that wills her to escape. _

_She will survive._

_But how?_

_Trembling, she ceases her useless shouts and backs away from the door, as a loose board in the wall slides sideways and a round, dark face peers through, wide-eyed with terror and misery. Becky._

_The little servant girl tiptoes to her, bare feet printing smears on the dusty floor, and takes her cold hands. She pulls up the edge of her shawl, wiping tears from her beloved princess's pale cheeks. "Don't cry." Her rich brown eyes are liquid with sympathy. "I'm sure they'll believe you."_

_Her friend's frank innocence and tender gestures only bring on another wave of fear. "No, Becky! I have to get out!"_

_The pigtailed inky head shakes a little in mutual despair. "But how? My room's locked, too." She spreads her arms, and the princess falls into them in a desperate embrace, vainly seeking comfort, her mind whirling in fruitless circles._

_A sudden flash of lightning, and an earth-shattering crash of thunder makes her recoil in alarm. The french-doors of her prison flail violently in an onrush of storm-driven wind, spattering the girls with prickling cold droplets. The monkey from next door stands upon the threshold, chittering frantically. He darts away swiftly, traversing his usual highway from rooftop to rooftop, and pauses at the balcony of his own house opposite her attic, gazing back at her._

_Opposite her attic._

_The monkey could do it. Why not she?_

_Becky, having gone to the window, gasps. "The police! They're here!"_

_She does not stop to think. Taking time to consider the danger would cut her nerve, stretched tight as a drawn bowstring. Her eyes dart around the attic, settling on the loose board that has been the doorway between Becky and herself. Now it will be her bridge to freedom. _

"_Quick! Help me with this board!"_

_Becky complies, trembling, the whites of her eyes glowing in her brown face. The heavy board clatters, rain-slick, to the mortar, spanning the fifty-foot drop to the alley below. They look at it in apprehension. Becky clings to her already-dripping nightgown. "Don't. You'll fall!"_

_She shakes her head, drops flying from the tangled strands of hair. "I can do it." _I must._ "I'll come back for you. I promise." One day. I don't know how, but I'll do it. I will. _

_I can do anything._

_Another embrace, Becky clutching her, in tears. She puts off the brown hands gently, and turns to stare at the window across the alley, the beacon in the darkness. Lightning flashes again, and the wet board glistens like the Indian sea. She takes a deep breath, and thinks of that first night in the attic._

_I am a princess. A princess is never afraid._

_Now._


	3. Chapter 3

The warm glow of firelight leads him down a staircase and into a cozy sitting room, where he is greeted by a voice he recognizes, and sees its owner for the first time.

"Ah! You've removed the bandages." Randolph. An old man, but not as old as he had expected. Rather someone gray and infirm before his time. He turns kind eyes upon the soldier, and turns his wheeled chair a little in his direction.

"There didn't seem to be any reason for keeping them. I can see all right." The soldier pauses in the doorway, feeling somehow awkward. He is startled by the presence of the room's other occupant; a tall, broad-shouldered man, dark-faced and bearded, attired in saffron-colored silks, standing silent and watchful by the fire. This, then, is Ram Dass, the Voice that has attended him the last three days. In the gaslight the Oriental's eyes glow like embers, and pierce into him knowingly, almost accusingly. He is suddenly and inexplicably reminded of the sound of the crying child.

"Well, come in, and have a brandy." Randolph beckons him in with a fatherly wave of his arm. He treads in, conscious of the softness of rich carpets beneath his slippered feet, taking in at a quick glance the ornate ornaments on mantle and walls. Again, the sense of exotic familiarity, like a brilliantly-plumed bird, shoots past him, and is gone before he can examine it.

The liquor is sweet and pungent on his tongue, and it settles his nerves as he sinks onto a divan, beginning to be irritated with the relentless hawk-like gaze of Ram Dass. The crackle of the fire soothes his worn mind, but he thinks restlessly of the ticking clock upstairs. He had hoped, illogically but stubbornly, that at the moment he opened his deprived eyes, his self-knowledge would come rushing in on the same tide of glorious light that greeted his vision. He had known, with military pragmatism, the foolishness of the idea, but his knowledge had not kept his heart from expectantly yearning for it. Now he smiles sardonically at his own nonsense, wondering vaguely whether he has been always subject to such idealistic delusions.

Randolph probes him gently about his health, his background, his memory. His answers are vague, weary; he cannot seem to pull his distracted eyes from the dazzling dance of the hearth-flames.


	4. Chapter 4

_One step, then another. Her breath is white on the air, her vision blurred with rain. The sound of the attic door slamming open behind her brings her heart into her throat, and the next two steps are quick and panicked; she sways a sickening moment over the bleak abyss below. A familiar and hated voice screeches in dumfounded rage, and suddenly her balance is toppled by a jerk at the hem of her gown. In seeming slow-motion she watches the board rise to meet her face, sees her own hands swoop to clutch its edges, every nerve-fiber singing with life-will, stubborn with disbelief in her own mortality. She is not aware of her own scream, nor of the clatter of the board against the wall edges as it bucks like a wild horse beneath her clinging legs. The sky and ground exchange places for a moment; she fights wildly with gravity and wins, finding herself somehow on all fours, the splintered wet wood inches from her nose. _

_Ahead, the beckoning window of the neighboring attic, with her precarious bridge connecting; behind, the face of her accuser glows white and livid in the darkness, turning a brief hesitation into resolve. Men's voices sing out warnings, full of anxiety, not unkind, but that face stands between them and her, and their concern masks an intent to drag her bodily away to…where? She grits her teeth, and sets her eyes on a spot two feet ahead, creeping like an infant toward it. _

_Inches away from the wall, her body jolts when a bolt of lightning blinds the night air around her. The board quakes, numb to her pleading eyes; its traitorous edge dances on the brink of the brick wall. With dumb certainty she realizes it will fall, and flings herself blindly through space just as the wet wood finally succumbs. Her flailing hands catch the edge of the wall as the open air yawns beneath her feet; the screams of the witnesses at the window stop just before she hears the clatter of the board on the wet cobblestone. _

_She is beyond fear; her mind processes nothing at all; she is a wiry collection of bone and muscle and sinew and pounding blood dangling for life from the edge of wet brick. Life! – it pulses through her, surges like quicksilver through her veins; it will not permit her to let go. She watches in detached amazement as one hand joins the other in clutching the wall's edge. Her feet scrabble at the wall, one toe finding enough hold to push her upward, and she scrabbles like a lizard over the cement lip. Only once her feet touch the floor on the other side does she begin to shake with the dread of what she has avoided. The hand that pushes the window open trembles uncontrollably. _

_But she is inside. The cold pelt of rain stops, replaced by the muted pitterpat of the drip from her sodden garments and the ragged sound of her breath. With barely a glance around the room, she collects her wits and disappears, a small forlorn lost ghost, through the nearest door, behind the willow-the-wisp of a monkey._


	5. Chapter 5

A sudden ringing at the front door interrupts a brooding silence, and the soldier startles, memories of air sirens breaking swiftly into his consciousness with a rush of panic. But no, he is safe. Ram Dass has gone to inquire.

A cacophony of voices breaks the tranquility, one of them shrill and angry; snatches of its ugly noise burst past the foyer and into the sitting room.

"Did you see her jump…just like a little animal…"

Randolph wheels his chair to the foyer, bewildered annoyance in his demeanor. The soldier leans forward to see the commotion. The sitting room door frames a tall woman with a face like a hatchet, bullying her way into the house, several burly policemen on her heels. The soldier dislikes her at sight. She seems barely to notice the home's owner before her, deigning briefly to explain, "I'm sorry to bother you, but there's a child hiding in your house unlawfully," before ordering the police to search the upstairs rooms. The soldier frowns, sympathy for this unknown child stirring in his bosom. What sort of child needed a phalanx of four grown men to apprehend it? He squints at the woman's angular figure, her pinched mouth and dark blade-like brows, and thinks if he were the child, he'd hide from her too…and, in fact, does so, leaning into the back of his tall armchair and resolutely facing the fire with a melancholy sigh.

Thunder crashes, and amid cries of alarm the house is plunged in darkness. The distressed call of the old man for candles rises above the stumbling footfalls of the policemen, nearly drowning out another sound, a softer sound, but one that the soldier, with his heightened hearing, notices – the whisper of the sitting room door sliding stealthily shut. Then -- breathing, rapid and terror-shallow. The back of his neck prickles. He is not alone.


	6. Chapter 6

"_Who's there?"_

_She freezes, her tortured breath catching in her throat like a snared rabbit. This room had seemed a safe hiding place; somewhere she could evade the police and then creep out of the house when they'd gone upstairs. Yet fate had betrayed her; the room is not empty. Moments after the soft voice speaks, the firelight-gilt edge of a face peers out at her from around a plush high-backed armchair._

_Trapped. She cannot run now; this person would sound the alarm. Despair washes over her, cold and hollow; she shrinks automatically away as a tall figure rises from the chair, shrinks away until her back is to the wall and there is nowhere else to go, nowhere to run. She slides down the wall into a miserable crumpled heap of wet black crepe, a whimper escaping her lips, and pulls her knees to her chest protectively. Perhaps if she can make herself small enough, she will disappear into the shadows._

"_What is it?"_

_The voice is soft, a mere whisper. "Why are you crying?" There is kindness there, but she is deaf to all but the pounding of her own heart, hammering oddly within the cage of her ribs. Perhaps she is dying. She hopes it may be so. Better to die and be with Papa than go to prison. _

"_Please tell me," the voice persists, breaking in gently upon the increasingly blank shore of her mind. "I won't hurt you."_

_She becomes aware of a pair of feet, shod in silk slippers, a stone's throw ahead of her. A man's voice, gentle and coaxing. And oddly familiar._

"_Won't you tell me your name?"_

_Her shoulders slump, her will broken. The name slides forth in a shuddering sigh. "…..Sara."_

"_Sara," he repeats, caressingly. "That's such a pretty name. Sara."_

_Lightning flashes without and within, as a bolt of recognition jolts through her, singing with disbelief. She knows this voice. She knows it speaking her name. As if in accord with her soul, the houselights suddenly flare into brilliance. She raises her head to gaze upon the face that has haunted her dreams for months, and whispers one magical, tremulous word._

"_Papa."_


	7. Chapter 7

The child's eyes are riveted upon his, glowing with a fervor bordering on insanity. The soldier blinks in slow dismay. He had been moved with pity for this pathetic waif, so small and alone – now he wonders if, indeed, there may be good reason for her to be pursued so mercilessly.

His scalp prickles as she rises from the floor, her face, so pale moments ago, now flushing with the blaze of some inner fire. The rosy little mouth speaks the word again, an electric tingling sound upon the pregnant air: _"Papa."_

Surely she does not mean…he hears his own hoarse, unbelieving whisper as though it comes from someone else. "What did you say?" Perhaps the sound of his voice, speaking cold sense, forcing her to attend, will break her from her delusion.

But with another hungry plea of _"Papa!"_ she is upon him, small hands clutching at his coat, clearly expecting his response to match the disbelieving joy he sees welling in her dark blue eyes. In panic, the blood draining from his face, he catches at her flailing arms, fending her off as he would a wounded animal, stammering, "I…I'm sorry."

The joy dies, instantly replaced by confusion. "Papa, it's me, it's Sara!" Her eyes search his face, bewildered, and he is overwhelmed by a rush of irrational guilt, that he should not recognize this child who so clearly seems to recognize him. "I…sorry, do you know me?"

"Oh, God, Papa," she says wildly, "don't you remember me?" Her hands, gripping his lapels, shake him with an un-childlike strength born of desperation. "Papa, please, you've got to know me!"

This is horrible, worse than his worst moments in the trenches; he had never seen a child die there, but now he is seeing it: a child's spirit being rent asunder before his very eyes, and he the apparent cause. Her hands scrabble at him fiercely, as though to dig the memory out with her fingers.

"It's Sara, remember? Remember India? And Maya?" He shakes his head, pushing her hands away, wishing to escape, to get away from this wild girl and her insistent hands, her pleading, despairing face.

Her voice rises to a hoarse shriek of desperation. "_Remember the Ramayana? And Emily? And the locket with Mama's picture in it?"_

His cry of "No!" coincides with a slam as the sitting room doors are forced open, but the child's terror-stricken countenance is for him, not her pursuers. "Oh, God, Papa, _please!_"

Gasps from the doorway. The soldier looks from the child to the white faces massed there, silently begging them for help. Randolph strains to the edge of his chair, astonished. "Do you _know_ this man?"

The child shakes him again, her strength unbelievable, and screams, "Father, _tell them!"_

He looks into her face, his heart shattered, and tries to recall something, anything. But his mind is a black void, a door shut all the more tightly for his panicked beating upon it. He opens his mouth helplessly, acutely conscious of the grip of the small hands on his arms, and hears the accusatory voice of the hatchet-faced woman, wavering as though in sudden fear.

"This child has no father. Take her away."

The police spring forward and the child screams, shriek after shriek of piercing despair as they pry her away from him. He squeezes her hand futilely as it is pulled from his grasp, gasping out his apologies, and feels strangely empty when she is separated. He cannot bear to watch as the men drag her, writhing like a thing possessed, still screaming, from the house, and turns to stare hollowly into the fire, his innards churning and coiling. The flames heat his cold face and he is suddenly aware of the presence of Ram Dass beside him, the dark eyes boring into him, the familiar scent of incense and spice.

Familiar. It twists itself into his mind like fingers of smoke. That smell. It carries with it a sound…of bells, silver bells that edge many-hued skirts and tinkle at brown ankles…

chimes that hang from drooping labyrinths of tree branches and sway in warm wind…fluttering ribbons and the clink of coins and beads draping golden idols…the watery plunking twang of notes plucked on long strings by dark fingers…India. India!

_Remember India? And Maya? Remember the Ramayana?_

The Ramayana. A book. An old Indian myth about the god Rama and a beautiful princess.

_And the locket with Mama's picture in it?_

His wife would read it to him, and they would joke about his being Rama and she the princess. And then…then she was gone, but he had read it to another princess…he had read it to his Sara.

_Sara._

A rush of emotion accompanies the name. It jolts up his spine like a river of light.


	8. Chapter 8

_She screams, blindly, struggling against restraining arms in near-madness. It is impossible, unthinkable that this could happen, and she must _make_ them see. She must, must,_ must_ make him_ see_ her, make him know her, because if Papa is not Papa then she is not Sara and there is no princess, no Sara, no nothing, anymore, forever._

"Sara!"

_The shout, blazing white on the wind, cuts through the voices of the police and the roaring downpour of rain like the stroke of a sword. She hears him above her own screams, her tortured soul rising from its ashes in a whirling blaze of many-colored fire. The arms that hold her back weaken and fall away like so much charred rope, and the wet pavement melts away beneath her pounding feet._

"_Papa!" And she is in his arms, tight and strong, a cocoon of warmth against the cold wet world. Her heart threatens to tear itself bodily from her chest; the intensity of emotion nearly overwhelming her. To lose him, not once but twice, and the second time worse than the first – "Papa, don't ever leave me!" Not ever. Never again. _

_His voice murmurs brokenly in her hair and his heart hammers against her forehead. He smells of soap and wool and brandy and tobacco; he smells like Papa. His hand fits the back of her head the same way it always did. She tightens her arms around his neck and sighs, and the rain mingles with the tears on her face, washing them away._

_From somewhere behind them, she hears a low, pleasant rumble -- the laughter of the dark man in the turban, her friend from the attic-across-the-way. His laugh, round drops of mellow sound mingling with the rain, wraps her in honey-golden warmth, like a velvet blanket, like the air of Home._

"_A very long time ago, there lived a beautiful princess, in a mystical land known as India…"_

_Fin._

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So. Yeah. I don't know that the chapter format was the best way to do this, but it was too long as one single page. 

As sappy as the original, I daresay. But this was fun to do. Cuaron's visuals are so rich they deserve language just as sumptuous. I don't know that mine really measured up, but, you know, we all do our best...

Back to real life, now.


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